1 “No Escape from Form”

In his 1981 New York Times review, Clark Blaise notes that Rushdie’s tour de force novel Midnight’s Children sounds “like a country finding its voice.” Whose voice is this and how does it come to be the voice of the nation? The country’s voice box is located in the person of a certain Saleem Sinai, who delivers his peculiar, hyperbolic history of modern India and its complex inheritance with suspicious self-assurance and presumptuous confidence. The voice of the country, as Saleem’s audience figure Padma discovers to her scandalized horror, is “an Anglo,” a racial hybrid born of an afternoon’s passion between two unlikely partners: William Methwold, departing British proprietor of Methwold Estate, which is to become the Sinai family’s new home, and Vanita, impoverished street singer Wee Willie Winkie’s wife.1 Saleem is not, after all, “Babar ki aulad” (son of Babar, founder of the Muslim Mughal dynasty in India), as the current anti-Muslim fundamentalist rhetoric in India would have it, nor the legitimate heir of a well-to-do Muslim family, but someone who was destined for the slums as the unacknowledged heir of a colonial overlord. How does such an individual come to command the stage as the nation’s amanuensis and spokesperson, albeit self-appointedly so?

Vanita’s brief encounter with Methwold points to a more substantial trail of historical bread crumbs.2 Named after an early factor (commercial agent) at the East India factory at Masulipatam who subsequently became president of the factory at Surat in the 1650s, the word “Methwold” invokes colonial history and its pervasive legacy. The historical Methwold presided over Surat, a city held and sacked by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, during the heyday of its Indian adventures. During his time as factor, Methwold is reported to have bemoaned the practices of his English company servants: “Their private whorings, drunkennesse and such like ryotts,” he complained in a letter, “have hardened the hearts of the inhabitants against our very names” (quoted in Dalrymple, White Mughals, 25). Part of this history includes interracial encounters that produced a group colloquially referred to as “Anglos.” This undercover, secreted history comes to light briefly in Saleem’s disclosure of Vanita’s seduction by Methwold, her silent incubation of midnight’s Anglo-Indian heir, and her dying in poverty and neglect while delivering him into the world.

How does someone with this provenance become the voice of his people, much less the nation?3 The answer is twofold: he does not speak for his people—even if the novel includes several sympathetically depicted Anglo-Indian characters;4 and he does not become the voice of the nation in his propria persona as an “Anglo-Indian.” Given their systematic exclusion by prejudicial colonial policies that restricted opportunities for higher education and advancement, Anglo-Indians as a group were not equipped by the colonizers to yield leaders of the nation, even if major national figures such as Frank Anthony belie this history as significant exceptions.5 Moreover, as Rukmini Bhaya Nair explains, “no historian disagrees with the patent conclusion that the Anglo-Indians were deliberately erased as a community—first by the British and then, collusively, by the elite and caste-conscious Indian administrators who took over the governing of the country after 1947” (Lying on the Postcolonial Couch, 32). Setting aside the fact that Saleem is deluded in assuming that he speaks as the voice of the nation or has a pivotal role in the national narrative, this fantasy would not so easily have been harbored by an impoverished bastard born in the charity ward of the same hospital as Amina and Ahmed Sinai’s real heir, Shiva. Originally destined for the slums where his doppelgänger Shiva languishes as a child, Saleem was never intended to be the voice of the nation, which is to say that he would never have had the luxury of enjoying the illusion of being its rightful representative.

In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak cites an East India Company document on criteria for the employability of Anglo-Indians. Apart from proof of European ancestry—“the stipulated qualification of legitimate birth”—the candidate must furnish proof that he “has had the benefit of a liberal Education,” a “clinching requirement” in Spivak’s words (document quoted 166–67). Spivak’s identification of the specific terms of “the right of access to a white world administering the black” is poignantly resonant for a postcolonial world reconjugating indigenous preoccupations with birth and cultivation in conversation with those introduced by colonial modernity (167). When “the empire writes back”—to use Rushdie’s phrase—it does so courtesy of the legacy of an expensive, exclusionary colonial education designed to form “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” in Macaulay’s aforementioned words (Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back,” 8, 249). Pointing to the relay between colonial and postcolonial hierarchies, Rushdie writes, “those who were made powerful then remain, for the most part, powerful now” (8). Midnight’s impoverished bastard child was never invited to join this class, but “thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira,” Saleem tells us, “I became the chosen child of midnight” (Midnight’s Children, 135). Saleem’s panoramic history discloses the politics of hybridity and mimicry not only between the colonizer and the colonized but also among the colonized in the aftermath of empire, and the displacement of anxieties about race and civilization into a range of bioformal aesthetic practices that converge with the politics of class and caste in what some colonizers considered a “once great civilization” (Goetz, The Art of India, 205).

Colonial interaction with India and Indians was complicated by multiple factors: the presence of a powerful Mughal empire when the Europeans first arrived in India; the status of Muslims in a majority Hindu nation; the odd racial sanctuary granted to its Parsi population; a usually ignored African diaspora;6 complex caste divisions; and a population comprising various others, including diverse, multilingual aboriginal populations. Despite the presence of this perplexing diversity, several prominent Orientalists believed that Indians belonged to a once great civilization and shared a racial prehistory with a group that came to be known as Indo-Aryan.7 Judgments of “the wonder that was India” in A. L. Basham’s eponymous history and in Friedrich von Schlegel’s passionate assertion that “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin” exerted a complicated influence on both sides (quoted in Bernal, Black Athena, 230).8 Trautmann claims that in the British vision of India, “the Aryan idea always has the function of being a sign of the kinship between the two nations” (Aryans and British India, 15). Max Müller declared the East Indian “our Aryan brother” (quoted in Sreedharan, A Textbook of Historiography, 424); Indian leaders such as Keshab Chandra Sen believed that “in the advent of the English nation in India we see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race” (quoted in Thapar, India, 16); and Mahatma Gandhi claimed that “both the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan” (quoted in Steger, “Mahatma Gandhi on Indian Self-Rule,” 133). These comments suggest a bidirectional racial sense veering on racial pride that abides in displaced forms to this day.

Gradually, however, imperial ambassadors of a civilizational mission that also devalued its own poor, underclass, and female populations, began to favor the doctrine of degeneracy over the narrative of kinship. David Arnold concludes that in colonial estimation, “some Indians might be deemed to have European-like complexions or physiques, they might even be regarded as fellow ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Aryans’, but that did not signify a shared ethnic identity in the present nor a common social and political destiny in the future” (“Race, Place, and Bodily Difference,” 273).9 Darwin attributed the dilution of the race to mixture:

The singular fact that Europeans and Hindoos, who belong to the same Aryan stock and speak a language fundamentally the same, differ widely in appearance, whilst Europeans differ but little from Jews, who belong to the Semitic stock and speak quite another language, has been accounted for by Broca through the Aryan branches having been largely crossed during their wide diffusion by various indigenous tribes. (Descent, 240)10

Hybridity and degeneracy are linked in the assessment of the native population even before mixture with the European colonizer. Degeneracy and difference from Caucasian cousins, moreover, are also ascribed to the “external influences of high temperature, and corresponding habits of life and diet” according to J. R. Martin, a nineteenth-century surgeon in India who concludes that “these general causes, together with the premature development of the generative function, produce an excitability of the nervous system, diminished volume, enervation, and relaxation of the muscular system as compared to Europeans” (The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, 212–13). Martin’s observations on physiological differences between Indians and Caucasians in a text published in 1856 introduce epigenetic considerations in the development of biological differences despite the fact that Indians are described as being “of Caucasian origin” (212). Martin is also alert, moreover, to the internal diversity among Indians, who “are moulded by a great variety of climates, localities, habits of life, diet, occupation, &c., so as to constitute in reality a people varying exceedingly in moral and intellectual qualities, in physical powers and appearances” (212).11

Why, then, did the idea of a shared Aryan heritage persist? Determined to uproot what he calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization”—the belief that “India’s civilization was produced by the clash and subsequent mixture of light-skinned civilizing invaders (the Aryans) and dark-skinned barbarian aborigines (often identified as Dravidians)”—Trautmann acknowledges that it “has proved remarkably durable and resistant to new information” (Aryans and British India, 4). The durability of the Aryan idea might be attributed in part to its dual serviceability for colonizer and colonized: for a Europe seeking a civilizational vintage for its own stock and for India in tracking relative civilizational distance from Africans, who were cast as the former’s absolute other and India’s relative other. Scholars have suggested that the myth of a shared Aryan heritage may well have been at the fulcrum of racial theories in the nineteenth century, putting India at the center of the production of hierarchical racial thought in modernity.12 Arguably, Africa and blackness as the polar opposite of whiteness could not have been constructed without the conception of India as a degraded Aryan civilization in a hierarchical chain of being.

After Bhabha’s important work on the production of difference in the enunciative context of encounter gained currency, a fairly sustained focus on the interdictory “desire for colonial mimicry” in postcolonial criticism has allowed us to investigate a desirous colonized subject who is “not quite / not white” and “almost the same but not white” (The Location of Culture, 86–87). Along with the historical, cultural, and phenotypic diversity of the colonized subjects of the British–Indian encounter, I argue that an extra vector must be confronted: for colonizer and colonized alike, the Indian subcontinental subject triggers additional anxiety on both sides about a people almost the same but not black and yet not quite / not black. Gandhi’s aforementioned appeal to a shared Aryan heritage was marshaled to protest what he perceived as British degradation of Indians in South Africa “to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect enough cattle to buy a wife with and then, to pass his life in indolence and nakedness” (quoted in Steger, “Mahatma Gandhi on Indian Self-Rule,” 134). It is not my intention to expose Gandhi as a racist through this cursory reference so much as it is to suggest that this is an example suggestive for exploring the ways in which the rhetoric of race can be displaced into lifestyle features mapped on a civilizational scale defined not only by a colonial mind-set but an indigenous one in which cultural, chromatic, and other hierarchies hold considerable valence. Both rely on evaluative judgments founded in the criterion of the inadequate formation of plastic bodies or their actual deformation, producing mirror images of native and imperial notions of hierarchy, without erasing the structural inequalities implicit in the latter. It was in reference to aboriginals that “the most extreme language of race, especially the physicality of race, was employed, with the supposedly debased physical type of ‘the Negro’ (rather than that of the allegedly elevated ‘Caucasian’) as the principal guide” (Arnold, “Race, Place, and Bodily Difference,” 266).13 The drama of plastic bodies in the Indian imperial scene thus plays out on a stage more crowded than we normally credit; it includes not only diversely brown bodies against unmarked, indefinable whiteness as the norm, but also the absent black as an instructive, negative model.

Midnight’s Children introduces us to South Asian pigmentocracy through the figure of Saleem’s “mother” Amina, who was born Mumtaz and changes her name at her husband Ahmed’s request. Born “black Mumtaz,” albeit with “luminous skin” (57), she “who had come out of her mother’s womb as black as midnight” (59), and whose “dark skin stood between her and the affections of her mother” (56), was “the blackie whom she [her mother] had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman” (60). Years later, soon after she and Ahmed are living in Delhi after their wedding, his coquettish cousin Zohra looks in on the young couple, and flirts openly with the young Ahmed, “then in the high-summer of his charm” (77): “Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji! . . . Just like me, don’tyouthink? . . . Lovely pink babies we’ll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white couples?” (77). With Amina out of sight, Zohra continues: “How awful to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even blackies know white is nicer, don’tyouthinkso?” (77). Spying Amina, who has just walked in, Zohra cries: “‘Oh, present company excluded, of course!’ just in case, not being sure whether she’s been overheard or not, and ‘Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn’t so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!’” (78). Amina’s mother’s and Zohra’s prejudice against Amina’s dark complexion calls out a widely shared dislike of dark skin in the subcontinental psyche. “Black” and “blackie” are derogatory terms routinely used by many characters in the novel, including Amina. “‘Saleem, you’ve dubashed [messed up] your room again, you black man!’ Mary would cry” (151), while Amina scolds the young boy thus: “‘You black man! Goonda!’” (151, 194). “When I spilt 7-Up on the carpet or sneezed into my dinner,” Saleem confides, “the worst my uncle would say was ‘Hai-yo! Black man!’” (289). At the same time, the text makes explicit reference to “fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian ‘blackies’” and Pakistanis cursing Bangladeshi fellow Muslims as “blackies” (306).

Rushdie goes to some lengths to underline the shame of darkness through numerous references to his dark mother and to his father’s pleased response to being afflicted by vitiligo because it lightens his skin.

[Ahmed] was secretly rather pleased when they [doctors] failed to explain the problem or prescribe a cure, because he had long envied Europeans their pigmentation. One day . . . he told Lila Sabarmati at the cocktail hour: “All the best people are white under the skin; I have merely given up pretending.” His neighbours, all of whom were darker than he, laughed politely and felt curiously ashamed. (212)

Skin, “the most visible of fetishes,” and the implications of being “white under the skin” are reconjugated in Rushdie’s literalization of hybridity as biological transformation (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 78, 212). Rushdie then goes a step further by hitching color and its submerged nod toward race and to other more clearly social and economic texts: Ahmed’s is not a solitary condition: “The businessmen of India were turning white” (212). In alloying color with the ostensibly dephenomenalized character of capital, moreover, Rushdie yokes together color, capital, and colonialism.

In addition to enshrining civilizational hierarchies among racially diverse colonized people, colonialism and the civilizing mission also fortified hierarchies intraculturally and intranationally, exposing internal fissures and creating new ones. Saleem’s father, Ahmed, who is marginal in a Hindu national narrative and belittled in a colonial one, is described as bedeviled by the question of origins and fabricates “fictional ancestors” in a bid to rival William Methwold’s pedigree (128). Simultaneously victim of a civilizational hangover and a colonial concussion, Ahmed, “anxious to impress the departing Englishman,” “apeing Oxford drawl,” had laid claim to “Mughal blood”: “Wrong side of the blanket, of course, but Mughal certainly” (127). “To hammer his point home,” Ahmed invents a family curse that will haunt him in years to come, proving that one can be haunted by fiction as much as by the truth. His fictional claim to a sort of hypergamy, even if illegitimate, comes with no reward, not even the temporary psychological solace of having passed off a tall tale as truth, because the departing colonizer responds insultingly with “a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes” (127). In a free India, his assets frozen, Ahmed is enveloped in “the old aroma of failure which hung about him from the earliest days,” steeped, like others living in fictions of the self in the nation, in a “Djinn-sodden” history plagued by ghosts and the unfinished business of the past (242). Saleem’s accidental primus inter pares status as the chosen midnight’s child born in a bourgeois family is thus haunted at the outset not only by the suppressed history of Anglo-Indians but also by an anxious Muslim identity also seeking its own secure genealogy within the text of a Hindu majority nation born in a bloodbath while the colonizers have got off scot-free. Postcolonial scholars, Bhabha prominent among them, have labored to develop theories of hybridity that challenge the ruse of origins. Rushdie’s repeated confrontations with the problem of race suggest that interstitiality, or indeterminacy, of identity is nonetheless no armor against racism. Colonial encounter may well have compounded anxieties about origins, not only through its politics of divide and rule but also through its reanimation of the Aryan thesis.

Along with the usual racial politics associated with colonialism, an additional vector of imperial biopower is the mirroring of colonial prejudices toward those seen as inferior in its own population and the development of prejudicial structures in the colony in dialogue with indigenous prejudices and divides. Classist and other diversities of expression within cultures reinforce the hierarchies implicit in the civilizing project, even if they are routinely overlooked to produce the ideological average in discussions of intercultural encounter. If colonial aesthetics produced (menacing) subjects “almost the same but not white,” they also produced a class of persons distinct from the rest of the native population, as Macaulay’s minute had promised all along (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86–87). English, at once an adjective and a noun, must be understood simultaneously as language, culture, and class. English is a “class act.” Along with caste, financial status, and other existing hierarchies, colonial education and the anatomopolitics of the civilizing mission introduce an additional mode of class formation in the subcontinent. A recombination of native markers of elite status with the comportmental aesthetics associated with Englishness introduce a new bioaesthetic fault line evidenced not least in new techniques of the body associated with the “better sort” of natives: liberal education, posh accents, and the brandishing of commodity aesthetics, grooming practices, and so on (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 147). What I have earlier referred to as the moral economy of the animal, moreover, is another, underreported text that underwrites the psychocorporeal transformation of the “better” sort of postcolonial humanimal under the aegis of the civilizing mission.

Saleem is one of a host of “Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen” in Rushdie’s fictions. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda points to the distance between this secular elite and the rest: “Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group members. . . . Country’s as alien to you as if you were what’s-the-word lunatics. Moon-men. You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots” (165–66). Vasco Miranda does not mention the remaking of flesh implicit in the revision of daily motions and functions, but they include, as Saleem’s mother Amina notes, British-style bathrooms, with “no water near the pot” and the unbelievable practice of “wiping . . . bottoms with paper only!,” a practice that is widespread in today’s India with squat toilets gradually disappearing from newer constructions in urban locations (110).

The list of “bleddy Minutemen” includes Saladin Chamcha, who “prayed for an English victory” when the English team played India, a proclivity admittedly rare in postcolonial India (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 37). Postcolonial minutemen, sold on an English-medium understanding of the meaning of progress, development, and self-election as superior, were designed to continue the legacy of the former rulers in their polished accents. In a corpus that teems with aspirational cultural hybrids, Chamcha discovers the traps that lie in a return home, as memory, place, and earlier training threaten to overturn the careful cultivation of better form. In a fit of jet-lagged stupor, he finds himself reverting to an Indian accent when awakened by the flight attendant on his way back to London from India:

Something to drink, sir? A drink?, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. “Achha, means what?” he mumbled. “Alcoholic beverage or what?” And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: “So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only.” (The Satanic Verses, 34)

Chamcha has spent a long time learning to manage his bodily emissions and effluences—its sounds and its fluids—in accord with English taste and “civilized” society, and what I have earlier referred to as the civilizational code of postanimal aesthetics. Chamcha’s relapse occasions “a nasty surprise” and fear that he will regress into the discredited ways of the uncultivated native:

How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to go Home, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster. (The Satanic Verses, 34)

Chamcha’s list of “diabolical humiliations” includes a host of practices Fanon would have described as the native’s “original forms of existing” (Toward the African Revolution, 38); in the subcontinent, grooming with hair oil, cleaning out phlegm in the manner Chamcha has come to loathe, and the love of indigenous wrestling have been cast into the narrative of tradition at best and regression at worst.

Chamcha’s fears of regression stem from a fear of being seen as inadequately postanimal in his speech as well as other bodily expressions. As he fears, the labor of this assimilated immigrant can be undone in a minute, as history bursts through a weak moment on the part of the mimic, or a strong one on the part of the Enoch Powells of the world. On his way to the detention center for other immigrants with less polished accents, Chamcha will learn that he is one among many perceived as “all the same . . . animals [who can’t be expected] to observe civilized standards” (The Satanic Verses, 159). Chamcha is incredulous: “This isn’t England. . . . How could it be, after all; where in that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might possibly transpire?” (158). A failure to study the sources of one’s subscriptions can be dangerous. Outside the colonized nation that has also placed its trust in these borrowed Enlightenment values despite its collective experience of racism, scores of immigrants confront the limits of ideas that promise equality in principle but withhold it in the breach. In postcolonial Ellowen-Deewon, as The Satanic Verses elaborates at length, voice-over artist Saladin Chamcha, minuteman and mimic par excellence, confronts what writer Amitav Ghosh has described as “the +R,” the racism of the English, which scans him as incorrigible despite years of self-delusion and whole-hearted subscription to a liberal ideology that was to have delivered him to a utopia above race, color, and tribe because he was liberal, secular, and enlightened.14

In a conversation with the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh insists that “Race [+R] is the unstated term through which the gradualism of liberalism reconciles itself to the permanence of Empire. Race is the category that accommodates the notion of incorrigibility, hence assuming the failure of all correctional efforts (and thus of tutelage)” (“Reflections,” 152). Signing on to the program of modernity, Ghosh insists, enjoins a denial, repression, or outright erasure of memories of humiliation and shame in the colonial past. Indeed, the inculcation of bourgeois civility as an effect of colonialism may well have served to repress postcolonial anger at the debasement of native forms of existence. Ghosh suggests that intellectuals “flinch” at the juncture between racism and liberal tutelage because it “contaminates that aspect of liberal western thought in which our own hopes of social betterment . . . are often founded.” But then he goes on, “don’t we have to ask also, at what point does our aversion to this subject become either complicity or denial?” (154; emphasis added).15 Chamcha’s fears may well be founded in anxieties about falling out of favor in English society and its civilized standards since he has hoped to pass as a “better sort of native,” but it is worth noting that they are also occasioned by his fear of being thought lacking by an Indian flight attendant on an expensive journey usually reserved for the better sort of Indian among other Indians during the period of time described in the novel. While the novel dwells at length on the humiliations of being thought incorrigible by the English, it also seems to matter to Saleem that the flight attendant not confuse him with lesser Indians.

It is the fate of the ordinary masses—the unconverted, unpolished hoi polloi—that Saleem is supposed to be spared by “the crime of Mary Pereira.” Mary is Saleem’s nanny, formerly a midwife at the nursing home where Saleem and Shiva are born (Midnight’s Children, 135). Saleem’s not-so-immaculate conception requires a Joseph for his Mary: “Like every Mary she had her Joseph” (119). A disorderly orderly at the hospital, Joseph D’Costa is a radical class activist, a figure for the troubled masses whose ghost will become Rushdie’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the Marxist idea of the specter of communism. To curry favor with Joseph’s subversive credo and thus, she hopes, to gain his love, Mary impulsively commits “her own private revolutionary” act of switching the name tags of two infants born at Doctor Narlikar’s nursing home at the same hour, sealing their fate by “giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty” (135). Shortly after this domestic-scaled version of class reversal, Joseph, the champion of the people, is captured with his homemade bombs and killed by the police (174). Saleem is reborn as the “little laad-sahib [English Lordship] . . . from the big rich hill” in a “world cocooned in money and starched white clothes and things things things” on account of Mary’s unconsummated love for Joseph (228, 526). Mary furnishes the precondition of Saleem’s presumptuous self-selection as the voice of the nation after the lowborn racial hybrid has been repositioned in an outlandish Bollywood-style story of babies switched at birth, a passer malgré lui. Saleem, never intended to be its voice, is class-positioned by Mary, and therefore saved by “education or class-origins,” as he puts it, allowing him to tell the story of the nation by “a show of erudition . . . and the purity of my accents” (254). Class position, liberal education, a show of erudition, and purity of accents, Rushdie suggests, successfully shame Saleem’s fellow Indians into “feeling unworthy of judging” a man whose tale not only strains credibility but the bounds of sanity.

Accordingly, Saleem is processed through the laboratory of missionary education at the “Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School run ‘under the auspices’ of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society” (192). Originally, India’s European schools were not “nurseries for the ruling race,” and “placed an individual within the racially amorphous realms of the ‘country born,’ which included both domiciled Europeans [poorer whites] and Anglo-Indians” (Buettner, “Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 286). Gail Coelho suggests that mingling with lower British classes, Anglo-Indians would have learned English informally through exposure “to less prestigious BrE dialects” (“Anglo-Indian English,” 568). Coelho cites Spencer on perceptions of accent: “British attitudes towards the accent also appear to have been absorbed by many middle-class Indians. It is not uncommon . . . to find a middle-class Indian mother rebuking her child for picking up a chee-chee accent as a result of attending an Anglo-Indian school” (568). Buettner explains, “just as accent was an important marker of class, cultural, and regional background in Britain, in colonial India ‘chi chi’ English was widely viewed as a sign of social and racial ‘contamination’” (“Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 284). Among the many names designating the group—“Mestizo,” “Oolandez,” “Wallendez,” “Mustees,” “Metis,” and “Fringy,” among others—was the nominal Chee Chee, a sound bite of disgust in turn regrafted upon the racially mixed body. Yule and Burnell define Chee Chee as

a disparaging term applied to half-castes or Eurasians . . . and also to their manner of speech . . . said to be taken from “chi” (Fie!), a common native (South Indian) interjection of remonstrance or reproof, supposed to be much used by the class in question. The term is, however, perhaps also a kind of onomatopoeia, indicating the mincing pronunciation which often characterizes them. (186)16

Buettner reports, “a girl enrolled at Auckland House School in Simla reassured her parents that ‘I try to talk carefully, and I don’t think we’ll come home speaking chee-chee’” (“Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” quoted 288–89).17 By the time Saleem gains admission to it, the missionary school would have acquired its second life as an exclusive source of education for the well-heeled, yielding some of Mumbai’s most prestigious alumni.

At the young age of nine, “washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle,” says Saleem as he prepares for his exclusive education (Midnight’s Children, 181). Saleem’s will be a voice full of money, convent-educated accents, and things. A turn down the lane leading to Saleem’s childhood home discloses Reader’s Paradise, the bookstore where he must have bought his Superman comics, Chimalker’s Toyshop, and Bombelli’s the Confectioners, with their cake and “One Yard of Chocolates!” in a brief glimpse of this privileged upbringing and the coming explosion of commodity culture after the liberalization of India’s economy in a world already full of things in the “hillock-top world” (526).18 One of Saleem’s proudest possessions is a globe bearing the legend, MADE AS ENGLAND (319). The voice of the nation is not only a product of the class-sensitive “crime of Mary Pereira” for her Joseph, but something like a crime wave, one in which we might include the crimes of colonialism that produced the empire, educated it in the English language, now rewards it lavishly for writing back in the former master’s tongue, and creates new hierarchies based on language, education, things, and the “purity of accents.” The acquisition of capital qua capital as well as cultural capital through bodily reform, commodity aesthetics, liberal education, gadgetry, and other prosthetics furnish the biosocial weapons for primacy in the new jungles of civilization and modernity.19

In yet another unreported crime, we learn that Shiva’s true parents, the Sinais, never once “set out to look for the true son of their blood,” a failure Saleem ascribes to a “lack of imagination,” while acknowledging that “worse interpretations” were possible, “such as their reluctance to accept into their bosom an urchin who had spent eleven years in the gutter” (360–61). This belated speculative admission might explain why, as Saleem alleges, “when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents” (136). As it turns out, the revelation does make a difference. Saleem is exiled and his father’s tenuous hold on reality and sanity are strained to the breaking point, triggering a return of paranoid anxieties about origins and belonging. And yet, Saleem tells us, “if you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist’s knock-kneed, unwashed boy” (137). Beyond this family-scaled anxiety about origins is a nation’s paranoia about making its voice heard on the world stage of modernity in the cultured accents of liberal education. Saleem’s parents have little interest in their real son, who is impoverished, uneducated, and prone to violence. While Saleem is positioned to stand in for the metaphorical hybridity of all of India, Shiva, equally midnight’s child, could never be the voice of the nation, although he is recruited as its hammer with his powerful knees. Moreover, Saleem’s own dislike of Shiva, the true heir of the Sinai family, is founded not only in guilt at having stolen his heritage but in his perception of the “crudity of his ideas,” as well as “the roughness of his tongue” (271). Crude, raw, impoverished, and undereducated, Shiva has learned the language of violence, ironically directed not least upon those who remain in the slums in which he himself has been raised.

What Rushdie calls “the Rhesus factor,” which betrays Saleem’s true heritage with fateful results, is also an arch reference to those parts of liberal ideology that inseminate postcolonial thought, leading to delusions of representative government, in the name of which those not born to its privileges can be treated as less than human. That most “mysterious of sanguinary attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey” (Midnight’s Children, 271) points its unanswerable finger at those whose accidents of birth make them available for bestialization, sterilization, and displacement in the name of development, their homes razed in the name of urban beautification during the Emergency.20 Authorized by the son of the prime minister, the slums that house the midnight’s poorest children are declared “a public eyesore” and razed under a “Civic Beautification programme” (511) that begs comparison with the civilizational re-formation of the nation’s chosen class of persons, the ones who get to define what it means to be classy, and entail in this self-definition contempt for the ugliness of those who are déclassé because they have been left behind in the underserved, malodorous, unhygienic slums of a progressive history that does not confront the ugliness of its own contaminated logic:

From the vans there poured a stream of finely-dressed young ladies of high birth and foreign education, and then a second river of equally-well-dressed young men: volunteers, Sanjay Youth volunteers, doing their bit for society . . . but then I realized no, not volunteers, because all the men had the same curly hair and lips-like-women’s-labia, and the elegant ladies were all identical, too . . . standing in the chaos of the slum clearance programme, I was shown once again that the ruling dynasty of India had learned how to replicate itself. (Midnight’s Children, 511)

In what is tantamount to biological warfare on those obliged to live closer to a state of nature, the slum-dwellers are led to vasectomy tents in the name of a civic, civil project of beautification that targets its poorest hut-dwellers for culling. The erasure of a slum “where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung” resurrects the figure of the animal even as civic beautification begins to look like pest control (465). To Ghosh’s appending of “+R” to liberal ideology, we might then add, “+C” and “+A,” which is to say class and the Rhesus factor that recalls the specter of unredeemed animal being.

The unexpected rise of Saleem’s historical twin, Shiva, once a slum-dweller, offers further indictment of the ironies of melioration and social betterment. Shiva explodes onto the scene at the same time as “India’s arrival . . . at the nuclear age” (486). Harnessing his hopes for social betterment to war, Shiva becomes one more example of the ways in which “war and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system,” as Walter Benjamin observes (Illuminations, 241). Benjamin notes that the aesthetics of war appears as follows: “If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war” (242). This is why, as the Futurists note, war is beautiful, for humankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (242). The pipeline from a position of class immobility into the army is a familiar one in many nations. Rushdie’s alertness to the mobilization of its poorest for the nation’s defense from its foreign others, as well as the others within, becomes evident in his exploration of Shiva’s career as enforcer within the nation as well as its martial arm without.

Shiva’s fortunes rise in the Bangladesh war of 1971, as legends of his exploits “leaped into newspaper and into magazines, and thus insinuated themselves into the salons of the well-to-do . . . so that Shiva found himself elevated in social status as well as military rank” (Midnight’s Children, 487). Shiva subsequently becomes known as a ladies’ man, “a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud” (487). He also develops a reputation for deserting “the bedrooms of all who bore his children” (488). Among those he impregnates and abandons are Parvati from the slums and Roshanara from the elevated social circle to which he has been admitted as a war hero. Horrified at his impregnation of Parvati, Shiva confronts “a balloon-fronted slum girl, who now seemed to him to represent everything he most feared—she became the personification of the slums of his childhood, from which he had escaped, and which now, through her, through her damnable child, were trying to drag him down down down again” (492).

Shiva’s intercourse with the rich, however, had never been other than tenuous. Roshanara, the spurned society woman, exacts her revenge in terms of the very ways of being Shiva has learned to be ashamed of:

Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don’t fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that’s how we think of you, my God it’s disgusting just to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don’t you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can’t hear your belches and breakings of wind, you’re just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown. (489)

Shiva’s cruel education in the caprice of meliorative aesthetics and liberal tutelage is worth quoting in full:

After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he’d never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behaviour, it was no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies, understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet . . . he learned that a man may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how to hold a spoon. (489)

Language, technics, prosthetics—the attributes of the human that are refused to the animal—furnish the scale from which civilized taste draws its authority. Shiva’s failure by the rubric of civilization, where empty forms overtake all other considerations, fuels his hatred against those in power as well as those without it, like himself. Saleem claims that he knows that this is why Shiva grabbed the chance at power when offered the chance by the Emergency—a project that will turn his violence loose upon his own.21

In yet another twist in the narrative, the same war that makes Shiva a hero reduces Saleem, for a short period, to preverbal, macrosmatic existence as a sniffer man-dog in service of CUTIA (meaning “bitch” in Hindi), the Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities deployed during the Bangladesh War. Deprived of speech, the defining attribute of the human in contradistinction to the animal in most philosophical traditions, he is an object of derision and abuse. Both children of midnight are pressed into service in the war machine, Shiva on the Indian side and Saleem on the Pakistani. The redirection of this “nasal inheritance” from its powerful uses as the instrument of a “nasal ethics” that allows him to sniff out “the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism, and the inalienable opposition existing between the after-shave of Sind Club members and the poverty-reek of the street-sleeping beggars at the Club gates” points to the perversion of a sensory capacity for sniffing out injustice and inequality in favor of prejudicial, and indeed violent, uses (Midnight’s Children, 380). Classen’s observation that the “Latin word sagax (sagacious), meant both a keen sense of smell and a shrewd mind,” suggests a body–mind relationship that would change over time to divorce the two and repress humanity’s biological and animal prehistory (The Color of Angels, 59). The uses of the nose for pleasure, too, have come to be restricted.22 Elias shows “how the use of the sense of smell, the tendency to sniff at food or at other things, has come to be restricted as something animal-like” (The Civilizing Process, 17). Even though “in terms of the numbers and sizes of sebaceous and apocrine glands, man has to be considered as quite by far the most highly scented ape of all” (Stoddart, The Scented Ape, 51), Alain Corbin explains

Sniffing and smelling, a predilection for powerful animal odors, the erotic effect of sexual odors—all become objects of suspicion. Such interests, thought to be essentially savage, attest to a proximity to animals, a lack of refinement, and an ignorance of good manners. In short, they reveal a basic failure at the level of social education. The sense of smell is at the bottom of the hierarchy of senses, along with the sense of touch. Furthermore, Kant disqualified it aesthetically. (The Foul and the Fragrant, 7)

Corbin concludes that “Kant excluded it [smell] from aesthetics . . . Freud assigned it to anality” (229).23 So successful were the psychosocial mechanisms used to reeducate the senses and produce models for civilized comportment that Jews being led to the gas chambers were led to believe that they were going into a bathroom where they would be free “from lice, dirt, and the stench of human sweat and excrement. Rational people will go quietly, meekly, joyously into a gas chamber, if only they are allowed to believe it is a bathroom” (Bauman, Modernity and Holocaust, 203).

Saleem’s conscription as a man-dog tracker of other humans occurs after he is brained by an airborne spittoon—in the family since it was given as a gift to his mother, Amina, and her first husband, Nadir—in the explosion that annihilates his whole family in Karachi. Delinked from a legitimating bourgeois family apparatus, Saleem devolves into an amnesiac man-dog without the power of speech in a bizarre sort of species reversal. During months of training as a tracker of undesirables, he sits under a tree, hugging the silver spittoon, “with a foolish smile on his lips—as if he were actually happy that he’d lost his brains” (Midnight’s Children, 419). He has taken, moreover, to “the art form of the masses” (535); his teeth and gums are stained with betel juice: “‘Ekkkhh-thoo!’ (He spits)” into his beloved spittoon (417). Raised in a home where children were chided for “bad table manners,” Saleem now sits on the ground, heedless of the conventions of modern civility (180). Later, bemoaning its loss when the spittoon is bulldozed in the civic beautification of his slum, Saleem’s observation on a gestural object redolent with past ways, albeit unhygienic, is as follows: “you should never underestimate a spittoon” (535).

The spittoon is an overloaded symbol in the text: sometimes it points to the past and memory, and at others to a yonic receptacle for phallic projection, as in Saleem’s regretful failure to “hit [Padma’s] spittoon” (39). In attending, additionally, to its material use for expectoration—the spittoon is a “lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice”—the narrator alerts us to the confrontation between outmoded ways of managing bodily fluids and their newer expressions in ways that are deemed more proper to modern times (535). Coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s meetings with Deng Xiaoping over the fate of Hong Kong in 1982 make repeated reference to the latter’s liberal use of a white enamel spittoon, sometimes photoshopped out of press photographs, with the practice drawing comment in almost all media coverage of the meeting. “There has been a lively debate,” one British official is reported as saying, “about whether Deng’s habit of spitting while receiving visitors is done for effect, or whether he really is a vulgar old bugger” (“Hong Kong History”). Once used in the West outside bars and other public houses, spittoons are rarely found now, although cuspidors—from the Portuguese “to spit” / “place for spitting” (cuspir/cuspidouro)—are used by wine tasters under an opaque sobriquet that seems to sanitize the activity, in part because it now serves the instrumental purpose of testing, tasting, and grading wine rather than the idle pastime of old men sending out long arcs of betel juice “further and further from their squatting place” (45). Long before his beloved spittoon is bulldozed in Delhi, Saleem tells Padma the story of a “prince, or Nawab, [who] believed passionately in progress.” “It grieved him,” Saleem says, “that his subjects, who had become used to using the roads of Kif for purposes of social intercourse, quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of [the] way” of his Rolls-Royce motor car. The prince issues a “proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to pass.” Subsequent notices alert his subjects that “the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey its horn.” By the time Saleem’s sister, Jamila the singer, comes to visit, she is able to pass smoothly from border to palace; “the Nawab said proudly, ‘No trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred’” (Midnight’s Children, 383). Once an art object, “pukka [proper, first-class] goods,” as Saleem’s fellow soldier describes it in the screenplay version of the novel, the spittoon is now what stands in the way of the future as a reminder of the vulgar, bodily past that must be overcome in a nation anxious to restore its claims to modernity.

At the same time, aesthetic norms are also subject to revaluation as previously acceptable practices can be discredited and later recredited. In the early days of British presence in India, several Englishmen are described as having taken to the ways of the Mughal court. William Kirkpatrick is described as smoking a hookah, sporting Indian-style “mustachios,” with his “fingers dyed with henna” (White Mughals, 90). William Dalrymple reports that “moreover, James had taken on the Eastern habit of belching appreciatively after meals,” in addition to making “all sorts of other odd noises” while clearing his throat and his nostrils “in the enthusiastic and voluble Indian manner” (90). Mauss recounts the tale of the shah of Persia eating with his fingers as a guest of Napoleon III. Refusing his host’s offer of a golden fork, he said, “You don’t know what a pleasure you are missing” (“Techniques of the Body,” 84). By the standards of today’s polite society, eating with one’s hands and fingers is a dubious practice. In a 2012 article in the New York Times, Amitav Ghosh wrote that “he doesn’t go to Indian restaurants in London and New York because eating with hands is discouraged.” Ghosh speculates that “Indians don’t want non-Indians to see them eating with their hands and . . . Westerners don’t want to see it either” (quoted in DiGregorio, “Mind Your Manners”). In the same year, the Huffington Post reported that Indians were outraged by Oprah Winfrey’s remark, “I heard some Indian people eat with their hands still” during her special on India (“Oprah’s India Special”). Veteran Indian journalist M. J. Akbar chose to adopt a very matter-of-fact tone in response: “History confirms that the major power of an era determines what becomes socially correct within the penumbra of its influence” (“Oprah’s India Special”). In “Mind Your Manners,” DiGregorio noted a new trend in utensil-optional restaurants, citing Korean American chef Roy Choi’s comment, “I hope that people let their guard down and throw out some of the rules we have regarding etiquette and connect like animals.” The association of traditional forms of eating, expectoration, and postures of evacuation with poor taste and animal behavior that came with the rise of imperial power reminds us that the jewel-encrusted spittoon is not only an overvalued symbol of the past and old traditions—with their own regimes of aestheticizing bodily practices and announcing their class status—but a reminder of their inevitable supercession by new aesthetic forms defined by those in power.

Before its conclusive destruction during the Emergency civic beautification program, however, man-dog Saleem was able to carry the spittoon with him into jungles “so thick that history has hardly ever found a way in” as he deserts the Pakistani army and its ruthless eradication program (Midnight’s Children, 429). His violent participation in the war finally leads Saleem “into the history-less anonymity of rain-forests,” where the unit members confront their misdeeds and are led “towards a new adulthood” in a negation of their narrowly walled concept-driven identities (431, 436). The jungle echoes with the lamentations of those they have hunted, and the men are forced to attune their senses to the suffering of others. Adorno famously avers, “the physical moment tells knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (Negative Dialectics, 203). In palpable encounters with a history that hurts, the clamor of lamentation reaches them in fleshy, incarnate moments of sensation and perception, try as they might to stuff mud in their ears. In the jungle, Saleem and the others feel the shame and guilt that one would like to think of as some of the better attributes of the human conscious of the suffering of others, perhaps more so than the language, technics, and prosthetics of the civilized human world. The possibility of a new adulthood looms in this turn toward suffering, only to recede as the group leaves the jungle. Saleem’s subsequent history suggests that these moments of knowledge will not survive his brief encounter with the history-less sanctuary where raw instinct still serves a feasible purpose: that of drawing attention to one’s own suffering and that of others. What he has known as his old life awaits, and will reclaim him as he returns to the urban spaces of civilization and history.

Overturning Mary’s insurrectionary class reversal, Saleem’s magical return to India places him in the slums of his original destiny. A long way from “the big rich hill” (Midnight’s Children, 228), Saleem lives for a while with the wretched of the earth, finding magical possibilities there that the nation-state cannot recognize. No longer one of the “better sort” but part of the very dregs of the nation, he suffers their indignities and their fate until he betrays the midnight’s children to ensure his own freedom because he has been “forced into treachery by the treason of another” (517). Shiva’s treason triggers his own; they both undergo vasectomies, led into a chamber where, “because we are not savages, sir, air conditioning units had been installed, and a table with a hanging lamp, and doctors nurses” (522). Their generative potential is effectively neutered under the logic of the Emergency, a state, Benjamin reminds us, that “is not the exception but the rule” if we pay attention to “the tradition of the oppressed” (Illuminations, 257).

Saleem is spared a prolonged share in the fate of the wretched of the earth, once again through the offices of Mary. The end of (Saleem’s) history takes him home to “the only mother I had left in the world” (Midnight’s Children, 545), but his way there is facilitated on the one hand by “Businessism . . . India’s other true faith” (474), and on the other, by his genetically fortuitous nasal competence. Saleem will smell and taste his way home, thanks to “that impossible chutney of memory” made by none other than Mary Pereira, whose potentially misleading assumption of a pseudonym, “Braganza Pickles (Private) Ltd . . . best in Bombay, everyone knows,” fails to throw Saleem off the scent (544). Mary’s choice of Braganza for her pickle label establishes a direct line of descent from the colonial context that brought the islands of Bombay to the British crown through Catherine of Braganza’s marriage to Charles II; Mary “has stolen the name of poor Queen Catherine who gave these islands to the British” (547). By this time, Mary’s fortunes have changed. Mary and Alice, once more conventionally employed for “anglos” as nurse, secretary, nanny, have now become proprietors of the globally marketed Braganza Pickles, with Alice, former Coca-Cola girl, controlling the finances as respectable “Mrs. Fernandes,” even if she, Saleem suspects, “still has her little liaisons” (548).24 Mary, “the criminal of midnight,” is now “Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich” and who now “drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day” as a sign of her arrival in a society that prizes things and spectacular forms of consumption (547).25 She has consequently lost her teeth—defanged in her postanimal incarnation, one is tempted to conclude—and occupies with her sister an apartment in almost the exact same space as that vacated years before by the then-prosperous Sinai family in a since demolished palace.

Places have once again been traded: the criminal of midnight is now a respectable proprietor in the same space “where once . . . she slept on a servant’s mat” (546), and in command of the prospect of the “Bom bahia,” or “good harbor,” which prompted the Portuguese to give the city its name, according to Saleem (106). Mary has fulfilled her early promise as a champion place-swapper in a peaceful, private class reversal through businessism in a contemporary, Indianized version of the career of her distant Portuguese ancestors: the spice trade that had set them sailing hundreds of years ago, and ostensibly inaugurated the dawn of modernity and the age of global corporations. Joseph D’Costa, instigator of her first, pivotal crime, would have been proud of her success, albeit on a scale of one, at most two, counting Alice, or three, including Saleem, who is, after all, a fellow Anglo-Indian, or four, counting Aadam, his son who is not his son, and is left to be raised in Mary’s household. In a biographic, bibliographic vein, one notes that Rushdie dedicated an earlier draft of the novel to his family, and to his real-life nanny, “Mary Menezes who will never read it” (Midnight’s Children, draft, Box 16, Folder 2). The published version of the novel dedicated the novel to his son who is his son, Zafar. In a psychobiographical mode, one might speculate that Rushdie’s wishful culmination for the Mary Menezes figure in the novel serves to emphasize the poor odds of this kind of class mobility, even if the allegedly rising tide of economic liberalization after 1991 has arguably lifted a few boats. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, which is arguably the sequel to Midnight’s Children, the story of postliberalization India begins to be told. In it, Aadam will be reborn as Adam Braganza, “that twenty-first century kid,” adopted—readopted as it were—legatee of Abraham Zogoiby’s corrupt corporate empire in Bombay (359). By this time, the specter of communism seems to have receded almost entirely. At the end of history, in an India where the capitalist juggernaut is on a roll, the question in question may or may not be “who are you?” but rather, “how much are you worth?” In the new age dubbed liberal, Rushdie writes that “money . . . was breaking all the shackles on its desires” (The Moor’s Last Sigh, 343).

In Midnight’s Children, the impact of independence on the less privileged is measurable in terms at once historical, economic, and affective, through the Breach Candy pool, one of Rushdie’s literalized metaphors for the nation. Saleem’s retrospective on the fate of the Breach Candy Swimming Club in Bombay, where in colonial times “pink people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing up against a black skin,” furnishes an apt example of the transformation of colonial racial divides into postcolonial class divides (108). In the early years of Indian independence, this is what baby Saleem observes from his hill-top sanctuary:

Here is India’s first swimmer of the English Channel, Mr. Pushpa Roy [modeled after the real-life Brojen Das], arriving at the gates of the Breach Candy Pools. Saffron bathing cap on his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared war on the whites-only policy of the baths. He holds a cake of Mysore sandalwood soap; draws himself up; marches through the gate . . . whereupon hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as usual, and out he goes, struggling valiantly, frogmarched into Warden Road and flung into the dust. (147)

The sight of the famous swimmer being denied access to the watery medium where he excels, evicted like a splayed-out lesser amphibian, punctuates Saleem’s days throughout his childhood. In a curious anachronism, well after independence, the Breach Candy Swimming Club maintained a whites-only policy. In 1964, it began to admit nonwhites once a week (Memon, “Twenty Million People”). Saleem observes, “In the end his [Pushpa’s] indomitable campaign won a victory, because today the Pools permit certain Indians—‘the better sort’—to step into their map-shaped waters” (Midnight’s Children, 147). At the narrative end of the swimmer’s saga, Pushpa, champion swimmer and the nation’s standard-bearer in a competitive world, however, remains insufficiently reformed and capitalized; perhaps insufficiently pure of accents, he “does not belong,” we are told, “to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches the Pools from afar” (147).

In its final consummate irony, the novel repeatedly offers a visual illustration of the material circumstances attending the story’s composition, searing the following image of the nation’s incarnate divides into the reader’s imagination: Saleem, now a manager in Mary’s pickle factory, composes his Anglophone confessions at his desk in a pool of “anglepoised light” in a posture befitting upright man, while “Dung-goddess” and audience surrogate Padma sits in his “shadows” at his “feet” (90, 141, 254). Saleem insists, “Padma is what matters—Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus” (353). Instead of an implied reader, we are given a living, breathing auditor written into the narrative as implausible witness. Like his real-life nanny, “Mary Menezes who will never read it,” Padma will not be the reader because she is not a beneficiary of the liberal education the narrator has received up on the hill. She serves him well, however, as she tends to his many needs, not least to be listened to and to respond to his narrative. “The dance of her musculature” keeps him “on the rails” because he can detect in “her fibres the ripples of uninterest” (325). Saleem claims that his “squatting glimpser” is “captivated” (142).

But there is more to Padma’s musculature than its function as a sign of her rapt attention to or distraction from Saleem’s tale. If Fanon’s discussion of the tonicity of the native’s muscles indicates a complicated state of readiness to supplant the settler as well as compliance with the aesthetic regimes of the colonizer who has discredited his ways of existing, Padma’s musculature reveals a body that has evolved very differently from Saleem’s. “How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma!” Saleem exclaims: “There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp.” Saleem’s admiration “extends also to her arms . . . her biceps and triceps [and] uncomplaining thews” (324–25). Padma’s is the laboring body of someone who “stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living” alongside an “army of strong, hairy-armed, formidably competent women” (21, 197). Hers is the bodyness of differences that are acquired by conditions of class, work, and labor. She squats in a position that modern civilization has associated with supplication, defecation, and debasement. “Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of arm,” she is squat, as suggested by the adjectival form of the word, and someone, moreover, who does not amount to squat, if we were to pursue another connotation of the term in its association with the worthless by-product of digestion. Beyond the confined orbit of yoga studies (which Mauss advocated early in the twentieth century), the “civilized” world has come to view squatting with suspicion. A nineteenth-century French physician’s account of this bodily difference is rendered thus: “Savages squat whereas Civilized people sit, explained the doctor. A Batak, because of this, is akin to a monkey” (Regnault, quoted in Rony, The Third Eye, 3). Mauss explains in “Techniques of the Body”: “The child normally squats. We no longer know how to. . . . It is a very stupid mistake to take it away from him” (77). Infants are believed to naturally adopt this posture for elimination until schooled away from it. Common to primates and man alike, it is a posture both for relaxation and a traditionally natural posture for efficient defecation.26 Associations of the posture with primitive evolutionary functions have gradually led to a civilizing away from a position otherwise thought beneficial to the human body.27 The renewal of biomedical interest in its benefits notwithstanding, squatting is associated with lower-class bodies even in societies where it has been customary for centuries. With increasing globalization, postures of sitting, ablution, and defecation accord more and more with Western ways, until the body itself has been bent out of the natural shape into which it had developed through millennia of evolution.

Padma’s musculature is a vivid illustration of the bodyness of differences, muscular incarnation of the nation’s divides. Saleem’s plaintive plea to remember that “Padma is what matters—Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus” is belied by a history in which a rigid dividing line continues to separate those who sit and those who squat (Midnight’s Children, 353). Handcuffed to history but also harnessed by it, midnight’s minute-made child is a victim but also an agent of its exploitative, dominative rationality, reliant on the labor of his “solicitous Padma,” his tale of the nation’s history and its divides underwritten by his squatting auditor (Midnight’s Children, 324).